Lean manufacturing principles

Waste elimination. There are 3 high-level causes of waste we take in considration, to minimise or elimate waste, so that significant bottom-line savings can be achieved :

• Mura – Unevenness in production leads to over or under utilisation; it is ineffective and often responsable for next causes: Muda and Muri.
• Muda – Non value adding-work is any activity that the end customer is not ready to pay for and so, it is wasteful. This wasteful activity is summarized in 7 wastes: defects, over-production, transport, waiting, inventory, motion and over-processing.
• Muri – Overburden of assets happens when employees, equipments and processes are required to do more than they reasonably can. This ends up in waste: weak quality and downtimes.

Kaizen. Literally translated from Japanese, it means „change for the better”, but most commonly it is translated as „continuously improvemet”. Focus is in the smaller, but frequently improvements, made by every employee. Our project structures for lean manufacturing is made to be:

• Fast assembly: no special tooling required, minimum training.
• Flexible: can be rapidly modified to improve ergonomics, like add or remove features, change for different products, with minimal time and cost, unlike fabricated structures.
• Movable: the entire strucuture can be mounted on castors, so that manufacturing cells can be quickly rearraged for optimal productivity. Even without castors, it is relatively light, and can be moved without heavy equipment, unlike fabricated structures.
• Reusable: if the equipment needs to be redesigned, structures can be easily disassembled and the components reused to create new equipment.

The 5S’s. Our vision for lean manufacturing projects goes hand-in-hand with 5S:

• Sort: structures are open, this prevents the accumulation of unnecessary tools and consumables.
• Shine: strucutres can be arranged in a variety of colours and finishes, suitable for cleaning. It is also easy to partially disassamble strucutres if thorough cleaning is required.
• Set in order: the strucutre can be designed to present the right tools and consumables, in the right place, at the right time.
• Standardise: it is easy to standardise the equipments, when improvements are made, as the structures are quick and easy to reconfigure.
• Sustain: due to the open nature of the structures, it is very easy to conduct 5S audits, to ensure that disciplines is being sustained.

Visual management: consists in the ability to manage production from the Gemba (the work place) by sight, and our vision and equipments for Lean can do that with:

• Dispaly Boards: structures can have various display boards, that could be used to display live production information, announcements and other bulletins.
• Color coding: structures are available in a number of colours, so that the entire equipment can be colour-coded both for it’s standard location within the production environment and to highlight non-standard conditions.
• Design for visual management: structures can be specially designed to offer visual management of inventory, production rate and highlight abnormal conditions.

SMED (Single minute exchange of dies): we take in consideration that is crucial to reduce as much as possible the changeover time. For that, we can use custom carts and other structures to prepare in advance the tools and consumables needed in production flow.